‘I’m not going to rat you out to your buddies,’ I say. ‘You can keep your cosy little relationships going. I just want to know who’s fucking me about.’

Crowley makes a face at hearing Language out of a girl, but he’s smart enough to keep his gob shut. He taps his lips with one fingertip and leaves another few seconds for his scruples to impress us. Then he sighs. ‘Detective Roche lets me know when he thinks I might take an interest in one of your cases.’

No surprise there. ‘Roche and who else?’

After a moment he says, reluctantly – hates to jeopardise his beautiful new friendship – ‘Detective Breslin rang me on Sunday morning. He mentioned the Aislinn Murray case.’

‘Yeah, we already knew that. Is he the one who gave you my home address? Or was that Roche?’

‘I got it from a contact.’

‘What kind of contact?’

‘You can’t make me reveal my sources. I know you people would love to turn this country into a totalitarian—’

Steve pumps his fist and goes ‘Yesss!’ at the phone. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘You were saying? Totalitarian something?’

I say, ‘This wasn’t a journalistic source, moron. This was someone helping you to help a criminal break into my house. You think that’s protected?’

‘It could be. You don’t know what else he told me.’

‘Crowley. You want me to ask them instead?’

He shrugs like a teenager in a sulk. ‘All right. Breslin.’

The little fucker. I should’ve punched him when I had the chance. ‘How’d you get it out of him?’

‘Oh, please. I didn’t put him on the rack. When he rang me about the Aislinn Murray case, he told me you had a terrible tendency to dither – I’m only quoting.’ Crowley holds up his hands and smirks at me. ‘He said you could take months to close the most blindingly obvious case. Normally that would be your problem, but this time Detective Breslin was stuck on the case with you, and he didn’t want his name associated with that nonsense. He needed pressure put on you to actually do your job – quoting again, Detective, only quoting! So I came up with a little bit of pressure.’

‘No better man,’ Steve says, to his phone. ‘We could hardly think straight, we were that pressurised. Amn’t I right, Conway?’

Crowley shoots him a suspicious look. ‘And then, when the man claiming to be your father rang me—’